


Sound

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 05:03:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13780281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Tim and Martin are getting there.





	Sound

**Author's Note:**

> In which Tim and Martin are going to be OK eventually, fight me. I guess they get claimed by the Dogs domain which is lovely and uses the Beholding as a squidgy eldritch tennis ball. Not as fluffy as hoped but they're getting there?

Tim can’t move his legs. There’s a weight on them, pushing them down, holding him immobile. Helpless. His eyes snap open, but it’s too dark to see anything properly. He stares, struggling to make form from the gloom. All he can identify is a soft-edged shape, deeper than the rest of the shadows, waiting just at the edge of where everything becomes indistinct night.

Tim closes his eyes again, letting his head fall back with a thump that he feels but can’t hear.

“Martin,” he says, and it feels strange, too loud in the dark, even though it’s the same way he always talks. “Your dog’s on the bed again.”

There’s no response for a long moment, and then Martin shifts slightly, leaving Tim with far less duvet than the motion had warranted, the cold starting to creep in at the edges.

“No,” Martin mumbles, the words chewed, talking through his sleep. “Poppy’s not allowed on the furniture.”

“Oh, well, clearly it’s impossible, then.” Tim knows he’s talking mostly to the dark, but he and Martin have had this conversation before; its inflections are familiar pathways. “You need to tell her that. Or get her to stop opening the doors.”

Martin makes a pillow-muffled noise that Tim knows means something along the lines of _you taught her that_. And he had, but he’s sure that Poppy would have worked out how to do it herself eventually. She’d sat and considered the doors often enough after they had first brought her home, particularly when Martin was on the other side of it.

“I know you let her on the sofa when I’m not here.” Tim reclaims far less of the duvet than was taken, and Martin makes a faint humming noise, moves a little closer to him. In sleep, he shows no more remorse than he would while awake. Tim doesn’t expect any; he knows Martin lets Poppy on the sofa because when he’s not there because he lets Poppy on the sofa when Martin’s not there, just as they each know about the other feeding her extra treats and adjusted her diet accordingly.

“Our dog,” Martin says, so faintly that it would have been inaudible at any other time.

“Our dog,” Tim agrees. He reaches out, tracing patterns across the warmth of Martin’s back, and Martin moves into his touch, sighs.

At the end of the bed, Poppy squirms, and Tim manages to extract his feet. The blood flows back into them in a rush of pins and needles, and he curses, the noise barely above that of a breath. If Martin had been awake, he would have said something about Tim being a bad influence, and Tim would have leaned right in to his face and asked him to repeat himself. Martin would have flushed and then they would have laughed.

But Martin is still sound asleep, so all Tim can do is press a kiss to the nape of his neck, close his eyes, and wait until he joins him in drifting, anchored by the trappings of the little life they’ve put together for themselves.

Sleep does not come. He breathes against Martin’s skin, slow and even, but his tiredness has deserted him. He sighs, slides sideways out of bed, leaving Poppy to shuffle her way onto Martin’s feet instead, and pulls wider the door that she had already opened. It’s easy enough to skip the steps that creak on his way downstairs, to turn the kitchen tap on at the right angle to stop it making the whole house seem to hiss.

The sky beyond the window is darker than he was used to in London, and he stands watching it as he sips his water. Even through the glass, he can see a faint scattering of stars. There must be somewhere out there where they could see even more, Tim thinks, absently, somewhere away from even the concept of light pollution, where the whole night gleams with them.

He hooks himself onto the idea like a fish in a river, and leaves the glass of water on the side, forgotten. They can go to those places, now. If they want to. They can go anywhere. Make plans, change them, learn new constellations, and he needs to write it all down before he forgets, before he loses the blazing feeling of possibility in his chest.

He’s still writing when his pen stutters against the paper, interrupted by the sound of claws clicking against the tiles. Wrenching his face up, he sees Poppy first, trotting towards him with her tail wagging, and then Martin, waiting in the doorway as if he isn’t sure he’s allowed in.

“I’m sorry,” Tim says, letting the pen slide from his fingers. “Didn’t mean to wake you.” A glance at the clock tells him that it’s been hours since he got up, and when he glances back at his piece of paper, the shine seems to have gone from everything he’s written.

“I just woke up and you were gone,” Martin says, blinking at Tim through bleary, reddened eyes. He sounds as though he’s apologising, too.

“Go back to bed,” Tim tells him, pushing himself back onto his feet. “It’ll get cold.”

“It’s already cold.”

Tim sighs and makes his way back across the kitchen towards Martin, ruffling at Poppy’s ears as he passes her.

“We’ll just have to warm it up again, won’t we?” he says, but Martin moves too close when he reaches for him, and it’s more an awkward embrace than anything else. Not that Martin seems aware of the strange angles of it; he leans against Tim, pressing his face into his shoulder.

“Oh,” Tim says, tightening his arm across Martin’s back. “Bad dream?”

Martin nods, though he doesn’t really need to. The nightmares are getting fewer and further between, for Tim at least; it’s been over a week since he’s woken from the tunnels or the corridors or the Archives, from lying on those boards with the worms crawling under his skin, waiting for a cloud of carbon dioxide that never comes. It’s harder to tell with Martin. On the occasions that Tim’s been aware of it happening, Martin wakes from his dreams without a sound and just lies there, breathing, waiting for sleep or daylight, whichever comes first. He’s tried to talk to him, but Martin doesn’t want to talk about them any more than Tim wants to talk about his.

Tim hopes that soon all they’ll have left of the Institute will be their fading scars and memories that don’t really feel like them any longer. That eventually their good years will outnumber their bad. And it feels so possible, sometimes. When they’re walking Poppy, in soft sunlight as she tears through piles of fallen leaves, scattering them into the air, or in snow, Martin’s gloved hand in his. In rain, when they’re so soaked that there’s no point in worrying about it anymore, as much as when they get home and warm up and dry off. Sitting in the cold outside cafes, their breath steam, or tangled on the sofa in the early evening, Martin somehow sleeping through the soaps but completely alert for every near-identical panoramic drift over migrating wildebeest.

And then there are the other times, when Tim’s scars itch and pull or when they can tell without speaking that both of them are getting that prickling watched sensation again. Now, when Martin’s whole body is shaking, and being all right still feels so far away.

“Sorry I wasn’t there,” Tim says.

“No,” Martin says, and Tim can feel him trying to distance himself, shut his pain down and away where it can’t upset anyone else. “It’s fine. I shouldn’t overreact. I just wanted to make sure.”

“You can make sure all you like,” Tim says, and he settles Martin in the chair at the table, Poppy sitting on his feet, waiting for fuss. Martin obliges her almost automatically, but there’s an unconscious smile on his face when he looks at her, and Tim can feel his own concern sliding off his face.

She’s probably the best decision they had made. Before they had got her, it had reached the point where they were only going out when they ran out of food, spending the rest of their time waiting behind locked doors and windows and walls that didn’t seem thick enough, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Martin had been the one to notice, to suddenly veer off-course on one of their shopping trips, the ones that they had spent watching everything they could for anything that seemed off. He’d put a big bag of dog food in the trolley, and informed Tim that they weren’t going to live like that anymore.

Poppy had been scared, too. The people at the rescue centre said that collies like her were prone to anxieties, and that they’d been having difficulty finding someone who could cope with that. When they had first brought her home, she had growled at everything unfamiliar, her oversized ears twitching to pick up sounds they couldn’t hear, too-long legs stiff. She wasn’t so frightened anymore, Tim didn’t think, and neither were they.

“What’s this?” Martin says, picking up Tim’s piece of paper and squinting at it, his free hand still smoothing over Poppy’s head.

“List of places we can go,” Tim tells him, leaning against the back of the chair to see over his shoulder, as if he’d never read the list before. “When we’re ready.”

“I’m not,” Martin says, but he sets the list back down on the table gently enough. “I’m not ready.”

“I know you’re happy here,” Tim says. It doesn’t feel as true in that moment as it does in others, but it _is_ true, most of the time now. “I’m happy here too, believe me. But there’s so much out there to see. You always used to want to go on safari, see the elephants, or something. What about the Northern Lights? And I’ve never been to Rome.” He doesn’t say that they’re just as likely to die at home are they are somewhere else. It’s still too damn likely, and it’s something that has already occurred to both of them.

Martin’s face creases, unconvinced, and Tim rests a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“It’s not for now,” he promises. “We’re not going anywhere until you want to.”

“I don’t want to hold you back.”

“You don’t.”

He wants to ask Martin to go and look at the stars with him, to stand in front of the window and just gaze up, for hours, the places where they lean against one another the only warmth against the chill from outside, but there are nights aplenty ahead of them to do that.

“Come on,” Tim says, instead. “Let’s go back to bed. It’s cold. And Poppy’ll need walking in the morning.”

The sheets feel frozen from their absence, but they lie together, and neither of them tells Poppy to go when she follows them into the room. Martin turns off the light, and then they are both too awake in the dark.

“We don’t have to be afraid anymore, Martin,” Tim says. It’s easier, without sight, to get a sense of the words, and to push them from his throat.

“We are, though,” Martin points out, barely above a whisper. But he doesn’t move away, doesn’t try to leave Tim without his company.

“We won’t be forever,” Tim promises, and closes his eyes. “I love you.”

“Love you too,” Martin says, and Tim can feel the words in the air, the slightest disturbance of breath. He’s long past wishing that they didn’t make a grin try to split his face in half.

The end of the mattress dips as Poppy climbs onto it again. She curls there, huffs out a long breath, and lets the silence come back. They’re safe, Tim assures himself, his anchors in place. Safe, and, one day, even if it feels a millennium away, they’ll be sound.


End file.
